Child Pornography and Sunday Morning Worship

Yesterday morning I was reading a disturbing front-page story about a man who got tangled up in the underworld of child pornography.

His story was part disturbing, part tragic: sexually molested as a child, discovering his dad's porn magazine a few years after that, drugs and alcohol addictions conquered, sexual addictions that remained un-conquered and that eventually over-ran his life. And now he's awaiting sentencing, minimum of five years.

A separate story ran next to it about how the internet has fueled the exponential growth of the child pornography industry over the past ten years.

Yesterday was Sunday. So of course I'm reading this as we're getting ready to go to church. And a part of me wondered: what's the point of sitting in a room of beautiful (and not-so-beautiful) people and singing songs and listening to someone talk about a good God when messed up stuff like this is going on in the world?

I went to church smarting. I was angry at the crap in the world and wondering what good it did to go to church in the midst of it all.

And then I got there. And then I noticed the words we were singing, the truths that we were being taught. I took the bread and the wine. And I remembered what good it all did.

Everyone worships something. The man in the article had his life built around sexual addiction that fed a disfigured industry that led to a disfigured soul and the exploitation of kids. That's the power of worship, mis-directed: lives not just destroyed but mangled in all directions.

And so I must be there on Sunday mornings. I must be reminded to worship rightly because my culture invites me to worship wrongly--and then they wonder what happened when it careens out of control.

Child pornography happens because right worship doesn't. We exist to worship, and so we will--one way, one thing, or another. And so I must worship God. And I have come to believe that he has made himself known in Jesus in a uniquely historical way.

And so I worship this God, so that I might not fall into my own version of a mangled and disfigured life with consequences in every direction. And I call others to do so as well, that they, too, might worship rightly and avoid the destruction that inevitably follows a life of mis-directed worship.

Child pornography needs Sunday morning's worship. To be sure it's not a magic potion, not a cure-all--there's all kinds of broken, messy, mis-directed worshipers gathered on any given Sunday morning in any given church.

To worship on Sunday morning does not guarantee that right worship will happen. But to not worship on Sunday morning, almost certainly guarantees that it will not.